If your meeting has people who don't share a fluent language, you have three real options: bring in a human interpreter, make everyone use one shared language, or give each person real-time translated captions. For a one-off, high-stakes negotiation, an interpreter is worth it. For recurring team meetings, real-time captions usually win — they're cheaper, they don't slow the conversation, and nobody has to perform in their second language.
Here's how each option actually plays out, and how to set up the one most teams land on.
Option 1: A human interpreter
This is the gold standard for accuracy, and for a board meeting or a legal negotiation it's the right call. A good interpreter carries tone, hedging, and cultural context that no tool fully captures.
The downsides are practical: interpreters are expensive, they need booking, and consecutive interpretation roughly doubles the length of every exchange. For a weekly standup or a recurring cross-team sync, it's overkill — and the cost adds up fast.
Option 2: Everyone switches to one shared language
This is what most teams default to: "let's just all speak English." It feels efficient because there's nothing to set up. But it quietly taxes the meeting in ways that don't show up until later.
The people speaking their second or third language slow down, simplify, and self-censor. The half-formed objection, the careful caveat, the "actually, in our market it works differently" — those are exactly the contributions that get dropped when someone is busy translating themselves in their head. You don't notice what wasn't said. You just ship the decision and find out later that the person closest to the problem had a concern they couldn't phrase fast enough.
For a team that meets occasionally, that's a tolerable cost. For a team that makes decisions together every week, it compounds.
Option 3: Real-time translated captions
The third option is newer and, for recurring meetings, usually the best fit: each participant speaks their own language and reads everyone else's in theirs, live, as captions.
The key difference from the "shared language" approach is that nobody has to switch languages. The person in Tokyo speaks Japanese; the person in Berlin reads it in German; the person in Taipei reads it in Traditional Chinese — all from the same conversation, at the same time. No one is performing in a second language, so the nuance stays in.
It's also the cheapest of the three once it's set up, and the fastest — captions appear in about two seconds, so the meeting keeps its normal rhythm.
How to set it up
With Sageio, real-time translated captions take about 30 seconds to add, and there's nothing to install:
- Add
bot@sageio.netto your Google Meet calendar invite — like inviting any other guest. It joins automatically when the meeting starts. - Each person picks their own caption language. They speak naturally; everyone else reads it translated, in real time.
- After the meeting, a searchable transcript and an AI summary arrive within about five minutes, and the host decides who they're shared with.
(Today this works on Google Meet; Zoom and Microsoft Teams support is coming soon.)
A note on Asian languages
If your meeting includes Traditional Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Thai, the quality gap between tools gets wide. A lot of translation pipelines quietly serve Traditional Chinese readers Simplified text, route Cantonese through a Mandarin model, or strip the diacritics that carry meaning in Vietnamese and Thai. Sageio treats these as first-class languages, not afterthoughts — which, if you've ever read a caption that was technically your language but obviously not written for you, you'll feel immediately.
Is it private?
Worth checking for any tool that joins your meetings: Sageio doesn't use your meeting content to train AI models, and its AI vendors are contractually restricted from doing so. Audio is processed in memory and discarded — only the text transcript and summary are kept, encrypted, in the region you choose (US, EU, or APAC). Enterprise customers can self-host the whole stack.
Frequently asked questions
What's the best way to have a meeting with someone who speaks another language? For a one-off high-stakes meeting, a human interpreter. For recurring team meetings, real-time translated captions — each person speaks their own language and reads everyone else's live — are cheaper, faster, and preserve more nuance than making everyone use one shared language.
Do we all have to speak the same language? No. With real-time captions, each participant speaks their own language and reads the others in the language they choose, at the same time.
How fast are the translations? About two seconds, which is fast enough to keep a live conversation flowing.
What does it cost to try? Every plan starts with a free 60-minute trial, no credit card required. After that, Professional is $49/month and Teams is $99 per seat/month; Enterprise is custom.
The fastest way to know whether this fits your team is to run one real meeting with it. Add the bot to your next multilingual call and watch what the quieter people say once they don't have to say it in their second language.